San Diego

I obviously love to cook and eat. I mean, I write about food, don’t I? At the same time, I care about fitness and don’t want my love of the culinary world to override my health. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I exercise just so I can eat more, or that I work out to cancel out what I eat, BUT. I mean. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a factor. If I could genuinely stick to a 1,200 calorie diet of pure vegetables and grass-fed proteins every day, I probably wouldn’t work out an hour a day.

Lucky for me, I do genuinely enjoy running and lifting. I’ve started to appreciate exercise more the older I get – I find it to be a great mental as well as physical release. That’s why I was really excited when I heard about the Fit Foodie 5K – a race series geared around people who love eating and drinking!

The concept of the Fit Foodie was born out of the idea that a healthy lifestyle and delicious culinary experiences don’t have to be separate. Calories burned, calories earned, right?? Life is about balance and working hard so that you can indulge in those things that you are passionate about. When delicious food, working out, and good friends are all combined, it is a beautiful culmination of all that life has to offer.

This event started in San Diego in 2013 but it’s making three stops this year – Fairfax, Austin, and San Diego. Hosted by Cooking Light and Health, and featuring slogans like “Run. Eat. Drink.” and “Calories Burned, Calories Earned” I knew this was a run I could get behind. Plus, they have cool events surrounding the race itself, like a VIP cocktail party the night before and a rad-sounding finisher’s village complete with celebrity chef demos and beer & wine tastings. If you’re going to reward me with early morning wine, I will DEFINITELY run for you. I was planning on registering for the Austin run no matter what, but then Fit Foodie reached out and asked if I was interested in being an ambassador for the program – heck yes!

As an ambassador, I’m just spreading the word about this awesome race series annnd I also have a small bit of power – I have a discount code to share! If you use the code “ENDLESSSUMMER” (yes, summer, not simmer) when registering for the Austin 5K, you’ll get 10% off fees! And yes, there’s still time to register. For my fellow Austinites, the race is this Saturday, September 13. Or if you’re one of our Southern California ESers, you can register for the San Diego leg, which is happening in November.

ALSO! If you want to run this upcoming Saturday, I’m giving away two free registrations, good for the 5K itself (plus the finishers village etc.) and a Sunday morning yoga or bootcamp class! Keep your eyes on @endlesssimmer on Twitter to win. I’ll choose two people on Thursday morning. Cheers!

For more healthy recipes, cocktails, food travel, and restaurant reviews, check out ES Emily’s individual blog, A Time to Kale, or tweet her @emilyteachout.

Obviously ES couldn’t leave San Diego without eating tacos. And by “eating tacos,” of course I mean trying every last tortilla-based product our hungry little mouths came across.

One place in particular, Las Cuatros Milpas, a hole-in-the-wall in the far-flung Barrio Logan neighborhood, came highly recommended. The line stretches out the door, the wait is 20+ minutes, and there are only five things to order. Surprisingly though, we were less-than-wowed by the tacos, which came out of the deep fryer dripping in grease. Off day? Unclear. But it didn’t matter, because most of my attention was focused on the other item we ordered—chorizo con huevos:

There are craft beer aficionado, beer purists, beer idiots, and then me…an in-between of all of them. I know the differences between pale ales, IPAs, and stouts, but normally I’m just as happy with a $2 Miller Lite.

Something I didn’t know: there are tour companies that pick you up and take you on a beer bus around various cities. Or at least this exists in San Diego. BS and I got picked up by the Brewery Tours of San Diego at 10:30am (yes, in the morning) to start a drinking adventure. First we arrived at Ballast Point and I was kind of confused, it looked like we were in an industrial park at an office building and not a place where I could get wildly drunk. I went inside anyway. Leave no stone unturned.

They had at least 20 beers on tap; many of which (if I remember correctly) were brewed one-time only. I, for the second time in my life, read the word “sculpin” on a menu; the previous night we had the fish, and today all of the beers were named after various catches. I knew we only had a limited amount of time and only so much I could drink, so BS and I went for the craziest ones:

I am normally extremely skeptical of any Mexican food that is billed as high-end, farm-table, or just generally cooked by white people. It’s not that Mexican food can’t be creative or fancy, it’s just that in my experience I have found “modern Mexican” to generally mean smaller tacos, higher prices, and less flavor than the taco trucks (and of course — the dreaded no free chips and salsa).

So of course I was hesitant when I head that San Diego’s hot taco spot of the moment is Carnitas Snack Shack, a new venture from Chef Hanis Cavinserves (red alert – chef!) that serves slow food-inspired, pork-centric American cuisine, snacks and locally sourced craft beers. But then again, I’ve never turned down any meal described as pork-centric. I’m almost embarrassed to report that this was the best taco I ate in California. Slow-cooked salmon creek farm pork carnitas are layered on fresh, hearty homemade tortillas and topped with a vividly green mound of guacamole. The crispy-on-the-edges, melty on the insides strands of pork are like a weird, amazing fusion of southern BBQ and traditional Mexican. Fine, maybe Mexican food is allowed to get inventive after all.

But that was only the begining of a pork party that would know no bounds…

“Part of me really has a hard time looking at someone straight in the eye after they tell me they don’t eat bacon and not laugh….”

This is what my friend told me he added to his online dating profile after meeting too many women who didn’t eat meat. I don’t know what’s worse; the fact that these women exist or that he kept meeting them. Regardless, I found a place he should probably take women on dates.

I walked into Imig’s Kitchen and Bar in the Lafayette Hotel & Swim Club expecting run-of-the-mill breakfast that you so often get in a hotel restaurant, even if it was in San Diego. I was pretty tired and haphazardly ordered the braised pork and applewood smoked bacon hash (above), which the menu told me contained the hash, plus poached eggs, chile de arbol, and hollandaise on a crispy corn tortilla. My lovely dining companion, BS, went with the breakfast sammy: grilled country bread, eggs over easy, arugula, avocado, prosciutto, oven roasted tomatoes, fontina and chive pesto:

Being on the east coast, I never really eat uni. Most of my experience with the creature that is the sea urchin came from my freshman year of college, when I was a slave intern to a senior research project, and had to inject urchins with hydrochloric acid to make them…do something (I promptly switched my major after that semester).

On our first day in San Diego it was recommended that we try the fresh, live uni at the Little Italy Farmers Market. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I’d sure as hell never bought seafood at a farmers market, let alone eaten it there. Regardless, I was super excited for this. Sign me up. When we spotted Poppa’s Fresh Fish stand I was immediately intimidated. These spiky animals were at least 3 times the size of the urchins from the bio lab. (I’m not sure why I just assumed they’d be the same —-I’m pretty sure my university ordered those urchins from some weird biological animal supply company).

The whole uni stand operation seemed a lot less glamorous than I had hoped. The stand smelled like a fish market (obviously, what else would it smell like?) and I became appalled at the thought of eating there. But ESers don’t back down, and I definitely wasn’t going to say no. After watching the guys behind the stand clean some urchins and shuck some oysters….we ordered. And it began.

First, they put the live urchin in this vice like contraption that cracks its hard shell in half. Then, they pour water into each half of the shell and pick out all of the gooey, brown, inedible bits (the part that freaked me out the most), that are then deposited in that metal bucket After all is said and done, they handed the thing to us (when I say “us” I mean BS, I wasn’t getting near it yet) on a styrofoam plate. It was still moving: